This is taken from Dr Dan Etherington AM speech at the Social Enterprise Awards June 2014 in Melbourne. Inspiring... Imagine… the most bountiful tree on earth, the coconut palm, the tree of life. It provides so much, yet under it lives the poorest people on earth. Why? Imagine… In Mozambique a soap maker sits under a coconut palm and bemoans the fact that he cannot get coconut oil from the copra factory which has been closed due to war. Yet the very raw material he needs is right above his head. How can that be? What can be done? Imagine…I am sitting on an 80kg bag of copra on a tropical beach in the Solomon Islands and I am depressed! Nothing is going right. It is hard dirty work making copra. The prices are terrible. It is like slavery. I am trying to find a better way and it’s not happening. My experiments are failures. I have run out of options and ideas. I watch the locals in canoes taking the copra to ships waiting offshore and a very black man in dirty clothes comes and sits next to me and in immaculate English he says… “Tell me Dr Dan, when will we be free of the chains of copra?” I looked up to see a monument on the beach. It marks 100 years since the return of slaves from the Australian cane fields. They had been freed. Yet the slavery remained. With renewed vigour and determination I returned to work. Imagine… I am mending the roof of my caravan with a caulking gun of silicon and I remember the people of Tuvalu, squeezing oil in their big hands from warm slightly moist grated coconut. In the kitchen I doctor the caulking gun and insert warm moist desiccated coconut and squeeze the trigger, and the oil pours out. A Eureka moment! And so the DME Press idea was born, a small hand operated press that local people could use to unlock the bounty of the coconut in their own village and free them from the tyranny of slavery to a commodity that took away their value for foreign owned chemical processing into copra. 20 years later that trickle of oil from a caulking gun is a tsunami as the tide turns on an “artery clogging saturated fat” which has become a “good fat” that helps reduce cholesterol, increase metabolism, reduce weight, increase nutrient take up, reduce diseases like heart attacks, cancer and Alzheimer’s. In a people powered revolution, the health conscious of the developed world have adopted cold pressed, extra virgin, organic Niulife coconut oil and provided viable, sustainable business, hope and empowerment to people in tropical developing countries globally. This is what Kokonut Pacific does. For more read here...niulife
Posted on: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 00:23:35 +0000